A fan of the Yankees, Red Sox, and large sample sizes.

 
My 2003 All-Playing Better than Expected and Deserve to be Mentioned Team:
C Jason Larue
1B Travis Lee
2B Jerry Hairston Jr.
SS Rey Ordonez
3B Bill Mueller
OF Rocco Baldelli (better than any Sabrmetrician would have predicted)
OF Geoff Jenkins
OF Jose Guillen
P Esteban Loiza (ERA is for real - let's see if his skills stay this good all year, though)

Posted by Sky at 8:27 PM | 0 comments

 
My 2003 All-Fantasy Value Much Higher than Actual Value Team
C Ivan Rodriguez
1B Todd Helton (b/c Coors inflation) or Derrek Lee (lots of SB)
2B Alfonso Soriano (Luis Castillo honorable mention)
SS Desi Relaford
3B Mike Lowell
OF Vernon Wells
OF David Roberts
OF Juan Pierre
P Barry Zito


Posted by Sky at 8:15 PM | 0 comments

 
My 2003 All-Finally Fulfilling Potential Team:
C Jason Kendall
1B Nick Johnson
2B Marcus Giles
SS Edgar Renteria
3B Hank Blalock
OF Raul Mondesi
OF Milton Bradley
OF Jose Cruz Jr.
P Javier Vazquez

Posted by Sky at 8:07 PM | 0 comments

 
Just picked up my official 2003 All-Star ballot (ok, ballots) from Subway this evening. Went through and discussed my traditional All-Star selections with a friend, but then also had some fun thinking up other "All-____" teams, such as the All-Surprise Team and the All-Overrated Team. Here are a few (with comments) for your viewing pleasure:

All-Star Team (which I define as the overall best player so far during the 2003 season)
AL:
C Jorge Posada
1B Carlos Delgado (no one else close)
2B Bret Boone (better defense and SLG% than Soriano, and hits in a more pitcher-friendly home park)
SS Alex Rodriguez
3B Hank Blalock (only a couple others are having better than decent years)
OF Raul Mondesi (something clicked - knowing why would earn you millions)
OF Carl Everett (listed as DH, but, well, he plays OF)
OF Aubrey Huff (listed as 3B, but he plays OF)
DH Edgar Martinez (yup, age 42 is a rebound year)
P Mike Mussina

NL
C Mike Piazza (best OPS by a large margin - he's lucky I'm not voting a month from now, though)
1B Richie Sexson (Helton's better numbers aren't better when considering Coors - what's up with Thome?)
2B Marcus Giles (it's not just hype: AVG: .345, OBP: .400, SLG: .580, and good defense - and the 17:6 2B:HR ratio says more homers are coming...)
SS Alex Gonzalez (slugging over .600 - saw that one coming...)
3B Scott Rolen (but if Vinny Castilla keeps up last week's pace, looks out...)
OF Gary Sheffield
OF Barry Bonds
OF Austin Kearns
P Mark Prior

Overall observations: 3B is extremely weak in both leagues. The NL goes deeper in quality SS. The AL outfield has caught some sort of suck disease. Who would have picked Mondesi, Everett, and Huff as their top three OF so far? Honorable mention pitchers: Curt Schilling (look for a crazy-good rest of year), Pedro Martinez, Roger Clemens, Kevin Millwood, Jason Schmidt, Kevin Brown, Odalis Perez, Javier Vazquez.

Posted by Sky at 7:58 PM | 0 comments

 
First of all, I'd like to correct myself. I made a big error in my last post, at least theoretically, and I'd like to correct it. After determining the difference between "typical" league-best and league-worst pitching and fielding and making the warning that these number didn't necessarily correlate to how credit should be divided, I went ahead and assumed that defense and offense deserve to split credit 50/50 and thus concluded how much difference all three phases of the game there were between league-worst and league-best. Now, that 50/50 split is probably accurate for dividing up credit, but since that's not what I was doing, it's theoretically wrong. What I should have done (and will do now) and find the difference between "typical" league-worst and league-best hitting, as measured by runs scored. Again, I'll take the range from the third worst to third best runs scored totals. And yes, this is chocked full of park affects, unbalanced schedules, and you-don't-have-to-hit-against-your-own-pitchers issues. I'm fine with a rough estimate, though.

Last year's range: 856 (CHW) - 641 (PIT) = 215 runs. So here's our chart:

Offense: 1.3 runs/game
Pitching: 1.1 runs/game
Fielding: .4 runs/game

That's interesting - defense combined gives a range basically equal to the offense range - which show a pretty even split between offense and defense. But similar to the whole gravitational mass doesn't HAVE to equal generic kinematic mass, even if offense is 50% of the game and defense is 50% of the game, these numbers didn't have to come out like they did. And because they came out this way, it doesn't mean hitting is 50% of the game. (And heck, the error bars on these calculations are huge.)

Posted by Sky at 7:24 PM | 0 comments

 
Ok, the quick answer to the question posed in the last entry is .55 runs. The difference between the third best defense-neutral pitching staff (Florida) and the third worst (San Diego) is 1.1 runs. Assuming the average team in in the middle of the two (it's not), that gives a .55 run difference between an average pitching staff and the best/worst. Of course, this doesn't deal with park effects, either, but it shouldn't be TOO far off. Thus, if you had a choice between having average fielders and a kick-ass pitching staff or kick-ass fielders and an average pitching staff, you'd choose the pitchers, but not by as much as I had thought. About 58% percent of the difference between teams' defenses should be attributed to pitching, and 42% to fielding. Assuming offense is 50% and defense is 50% of baseball, that means positions players as a group show more variability than pitching staffs as a group (71% of the difference is attributable to hitters). Of course, it's not often the best hitters are also the best fielders.

And, of course credit distribution can change when you take into account the fact that Curt Schilling does a lot more on his own than Kirk Rueter does. A crappy defensive team with Schilling on the mound has a good chance of winning (with the credit mostly going to Curt Schilling), while the same team with Rueter on the mound has a good chance of losing (with the blame mostly going to the fielders).

And there's definitely a distinction between distribution of credit and differences between the best and worst fielding and pitching teams.

Posted by Sky at 4:36 PM | 0 comments

 
I've been playing around with a spreadsheet to compute expected ERAs based on DIPS, and wondered exactly how much effect fielding actually has. Taking a league average pitching staff ($BB=.90, $SO=.182, $HR=.37), I computed Xtrapolated ERA for a range of $H values around the MLB mean of .287. Here are the results:

 $H  XERA

.267 4.97

.277 4.75

.287 4.55

.297 4.34

.307 4.15

So it looks like the difference between league average fielding and typical best/worst fielding is .4 runs per game. Over an entire season, that's a difference of 65 runs. Definitely not chump change. The difference between the best and worst fielding teams is about 130 runs. Maybe there is something to defense winning championships. The next step is see how much of effect a good pitching staff makes over a league average pitching staff. My guess is .9 runs per game, thus making defense, on average, 70% pitching and 30% fielding.

Posted by Sky at 3:51 PM | 0 comments

 
Some quick DIPS trivia:

Whos' played the best defense so far in baseball, in terms of turning balls in play into outs?
Oakland, by a landslide. Their $H is .239. The number two team, Minnesota, is at .261. I guess Chris Singleton actually is helping the team in some way.

Which league has the lower $H?
Neither, both the AL and NL are turning 71.27% of balls in play into outs. Considering the AL has to deal with the DH, I find that interesting. I'll have to take a look at the past few years' values.

Who are the bottom five teams at turning balls in play into outs?
NY Yankees - but Jeter's back to save the day...
Florida - fast doesn't equal range, evidently...
Colorado - i'll forgive them, though...
Milwaukee - at least they can pitch and hit; oh wait...
Texas - and for Exhibit A in favor of park effects we have Chan Ho Park...

Posted by Sky at 4:04 PM | 0 comments

 
Back to baseball, like I promised...

People are slowly catching on to the whole DIPS thing. Even mainstream columns are using BB rates, SO rates, and HR rates to analyze pitchers. Two bad things, though - they're also using H rates, which is often meaningless, and they're using 9 IP as the denominator in the rates (BB/9, SO/9, HR/9). I want to rant about the second problem right now.

Innings Pitched is not the best measure of a pitcher's playing time - batters facing pitcher (what we call plate appearances for hitters) is the best. IP is dependant on how many batters a pitcher faces get out, which is dependant on the pitcher AND the defense AND the ballpark. If a pitcher has a lousy defense behind him, or an extraordinary number of hits drop in just by chance, the IP total for that outing will be lower than it "should" be. If Bob the Pitcher faces 24 batters, strikes out 8, walks 0, gives up 0 homers, induces 0 GIDP and has 8 of those other 16 batters get out, he'll have pitched 5 2/3 innings and struck out 8 for a ratio of 13.5 K/9. If however, he's a little luckier and retires 12 of the 16 other batters, he'll pitch 6 2/3 innings and have a ratio of 10.8 K/9. If you buy into DIPS, in which game did the pitcher pitch better? Neither, the differences are a result of defense and luck. So why would we want to represent his performance with the stat K/9 when it can fluctuate for no good reason? I sure wouldn't.

The worse the defense playing behind a pitcher, and the unluckier a pitcher is with hits falling in, the higher his BB/9, K/9, and HR/9 stats will appear, artificially improving K/9, and artificially worsening both BB/9 and HR/9. Instead, everyone should be using the raw DIPS ratios: $BB, $SO, and $HR, which are NOT dependant upon defense and luck.

$BB = BB/BFP
$SO = SO/(BFP-BB-HBP)
$HR = HR/(BFP-BB-HBP-SO)

Sure, they take a little getting used to, but well worth it. And you should be glad I didn't get started on H/9...

Posted by Sky at 8:07 PM | 0 comments

 
In addition to an amateur baseball analyst, I'm also a mathematician and extremely amateur philosopher. So here's a taste of something random:

How many holes does a pair of underwear (ignoring tears and the fly) have? Don't worry I'll skip the part of the story that explains how the question came up. My friends mostly claim three - at least they did until they started refusing to answer - but I claim two. I'm a math guy, I've taken topology, and I'm darn sure undies are a two-holed torus. So I was feeling all smart until my friend Amanda, who's more of a writer than a math person, chimed in with, "Underwear out of the package has no holes. It needs the leg and waist openings in order to be called underwear. Would you buy a package of boxers without the 'holes'?" Ok, good point.

Moral of the story - underwear has zero holes or two holes, but definitely not three holes. Back to baseball next time...

Posted by Sky at 7:37 PM | 0 comments

 
Hey, a spot on the web for my baseball ideas. I think that's a good thing.

I'll start off with a small pat on my own back, and then try really hard not to do it again soon. I TOLD you the Atlanta Braves weren't just going to give way to the Phillies. Sure, they're pitching is merely average, but they're offense is going to carry them for the first time in a while. Chipper, Andruw, Sheffield, Fick, Giles, and Furcal are a force to be reckoned with. Add in an always solid bullpen and you've got yourself a contender.

Posted by Sky at 10:25 PM | 0 comments